SOURCE: "Saint-John Perse: A Way to Begin," in Books Abroad, Vol. 36, No. 4, Autumn, 1962, pp. 375-78.

In the following essay, Nelson provides a stylistic analysis of "Poème: pour M. Valery Larbaud. "

More so than in most poetry, structure is the problem for the reader of St.-John Perse, for contrary to our usual expectations of poetry, a poem by Perse generally offers few direct references to the world outside the poem. That is, in Perse there are few points of reference within the poem which, by their simultaneous pointing to the general world of experience and the unique world of the poem, guide the reader to the poet's meaning. Thus, his images do not so much help us to understand the poem as the poem helps us to understand the images. This is the reason that while in much poetry we can go from the parts to the...